Every movement has an origin story, but the ones that endure are rarely built by a single person acting alone. They are built by someone who learns, early and often the hard way, that the strength of a community lies not in the loudest voice in the room but in the thousands of quieter voices standing behind it. This is the story of how one leader turned that lesson into a life’s work, and how a network born from her conviction is now reshaping what political power looks like for Asian American communities across an entire state.
In a small city in Wisconsin, in a household of eleven, a young girl sat at the kitchen table doing something no child should have to do so often: explaining America to her parents. She translated letters from landlords, school notices, and government forms, turning unfamiliar language into something her family could act on. Nobody had trained her for this. There was no manual for growing up Hmong American in a place where almost no one had heard of the Hmong before, let alone understood why refugee families like hers had crossed an ocean to rebuild a life from nothing.
That girl was ThaoMee Xiong. Today, she is Executive and Network Director of the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, known widely as CAAL, and she moves through legislative hearings, nonprofit boardrooms, and community halls across Minnesota with the same instinct she developed at that kitchen table: someone has to stand in the gap between people and the systems that were never built with them in mind. What has changed is the scale. Xiong no longer translates only for her own family. She has helped build a network of more than six thousand leaders who are learning to translate for themselves, and, in doing so, to reshape the institutions that once overlooked them entirely.
Her story is not simply one of personal triumph over hardship, though that thread runs through it. It is a story about what happens when a community decides that invisibility is not a permanent condition, and that power, real and lasting power, is something built together rather than granted from above.
A Childhood Spent Bridging Two Worlds
Xiong’s family was among the first Hmong American families to resettle in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is one of nine children, raised in a household where survival depended on cooperation. There was no room for a single person to carry the weight of decisions alone. Responsibilities were distributed. Everyone, regardless of age, had a role to play in keeping the family moving forward.
That early experience shaped how Xiong understands leadership to this day.
“I do not believe in the lone leader at the podium,” she says. “I believe in networks, in shared power, and in making sure the people closest to a problem are closest to the solution.”
It is a philosophy that traces directly back to a dinner table where nine children and two parents figured out, together, how to make a new country make sense.
But belonging to a large, tight-knit family did not shield Xiong from the isolation of being unseen by the wider world around her. Her family carried a history that appeared in no textbook assigned at her school. Few people in Appleton understood what had brought the Hmong to the United States, or the sacrifices that resettlement had demanded. Xiong describes that invisibility as formative. It was not simply that people did not know her story. It was that entire institutions, from schools and clinics to government offices, operated as though families like hers did not exist.
From a young age, she became the family’s informal interpreter, and not only of language. She translated systems: how to fill out a form correctly, how to respond to a letter from a landlord, how to navigate a bureaucracy designed with someone else in mind.
“I learned early that institutions were not built with us in mind, and that someone had to stand in the gap,” Xiong reflects.
That sentence, more than any other, captures the origin of her life’s work. Her sense of purpose did not arrive as a single epiphany. It grew out of a gap she noticed as a child and never stopped trying to close.
When Story Became Strategy
For years, storytelling was simply how Xiong’s family and community carried their history forward. Stories filled the space that textbooks left empty. She never doubted their value as a form of memory and connection. What took longer to become clear was their value as a form of power, particularly in rooms where policy gets written and budgets get decided.
That realization arrived gradually as Xiong moved deeper into legal and legislative advocacy. Again and again, she found herself in spaces where decision-makers had never heard directly from a Hmong American, or from anyone whose family had lived through the experience of refugee resettlement. She began to notice something important: a single, well-told story could shift a conversation in ways that data alone could not.
“What changed my thinking was understanding that my story was never only mine,” Xiong explains. “It belonged to a community, and telling it opened doors for thousands of others to walk through.”
From that point forward, storytelling stopped being incidental to her advocacy work. It became a discipline, something she practiced deliberately and taught others to practice as well. She committed herself to building platforms where communities could speak in their own voices, rather than having their experiences summarized or interpreted by someone else on their behalf.
This shift coincided with a deliberate investment in her own education. Xiong pursued legal training and later studied public administration, driven by a specific intention. She wanted to understand how rules are actually written, not so she could master the system for herself, but so that her community could eventually help write the rules that governed their own lives.
“I did not choose this work because of a single dramatic turning point,” she says. “I chose it because every stage of my life confirmed the same truth, that our communities hold enormous strength, and what we lack is not capacity but access.”
That distinction, between capacity and access, sits at the center of everything Xiong has built since. It reframes the challenge facing Asian American communities not as a deficit to be fixed, but as a door that has too often stayed closed.
Building Power That Outlasts Any One Leader
At CAAL, Xiong has spent years translating that philosophy into practice, and the organization’s guiding idea is deceptively simple: collective power beats individual visibility every time.
“Impactful leadership is measured by what continues after you leave the room,” she says. “If a policy win depends entirely on one leader’s presence, it is fragile. If it is carried by a network of thousands of people who understand the issue, know the process, and see themselves as civic actors, it is durable.”
That standard shapes how CAAL evaluates its own success. Rather than asking how visible any single leader has become, the organization asks how many new leaders testified during a legislative session, how many community members now sit on boards and commissions, and how many organizations can move resources without waiting on outside permission. Xiong describes this as leadership that multiplies itself and then steps back.
In practical terms, collective power at CAAL looks like a statewide network exceeding six thousand leaders, organized around a shared vision of a stronger democracy, equal rights, and economic opportunity that reaches everyone. It looks like small business owners, students, elders, and professionals from dozens of different ethnic communities showing up at the Minnesota State Capitol carrying one unified agenda, even when their individual histories and journeys to this country differ widely.
“One voice asking for change can be dismissed,” Xiong says. “Thousands of voices, organized and clear about what they are asking for, cannot.”
That approach has produced tangible results, including state appropriations secured for Asian American women entrepreneurs, a win Xiong attributes directly to a community that organized around a shared economic vision rather than waiting for someone else to advocate on its behalf.
Xiong is equally direct about the misconceptions that surround civic organizing. The first is the assumption that leadership belongs only to people with titles and credentials. Some of the most effective leaders inside CAAL’s network, she notes, are grandmothers, small business owners, and young people who have never held office but carry deep trust within their communities. The second misconception is that Asian American communities are politically disengaged, a myth that persists largely because that engagement goes unmeasured and communities are treated as a single monolithic bloc rather than dozens of distinct ethnic groups with distinct needs. When data is disaggregated and outreach is genuinely invested in, Xiong says, an entirely different picture of civic energy emerges. The third misconception is that organizing is primarily about protest. In her experience, most of the real work is quieter: building relationships, developing new leaders, and showing up at legislative hearings year after year, long before any visible victory arrives.
Keeping Policy Rooted in Real Life
None of this works, Xiong insists, unless policy stays tethered to the lived experience of the people it affects. Legislative work can pull advocates far from the communities they represent, so she remains deliberate about spending time in community settings, listening before she drafts anything, and testing every position against what families are actually experiencing on the ground.
At CAAL, community members are never simply the subject of testimony delivered on their behalf. They are the testimony. During Operation Metro Surge, a period of heightened immigration enforcement that spread fear through many of the communities CAAL serves, the organization did not speak for affected families from a distance. Instead, it brought their voices directly into the Capitol, and Xiong testified alongside that firsthand community truth.
“Our legislative agenda is built from what we hear in community spaces, and our community work is informed by what we learn inside policy rooms,” she says. “The discipline is making sure information and power flow in both directions.”
That same commitment to disaggregated, honest data drives how Xiong describes the urgent challenges still facing Asian American communities. She points to three in particular. The first is invisibility in data and funding: because Asian American communities are extraordinarily diverse, aggregated statistics can mask the severe disparities facing Southeast Asian communities in particular, and when communities disappear from the data, the resources disappear too. She cites a stark figure from Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy: for every one hundred dollars in foundation funding, only twenty cents reaches Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.
The second challenge is safety and belonging, as families navigate real fear stemming from a rise in anti-Asian hate alongside aggressive immigration enforcement. The third is economic inequity, sharpened by the endurance of the model minority myth even as Asian American women remain among the most underpaid workers in the country.
“That contradiction says everything about how invisibility works,” Xiong says. “Our communities are held up as proof that the system is fair while being denied fair wages, capital, and opportunity within it.”
CAAL’s response spans multiple fronts at once: building leadership pipelines across the state, advocating for policy wins like the appropriations secured for Asian American women entrepreneurs, moving flexible grant resources directly into community organizations, and ensuring that community members are present and vocal in every room where decisions affecting their lives are made.
Building for What Comes Next
Xiong is candid about the toll of leading through repeated crises in recent years. Her communities have weathered a pandemic that hit families and small businesses hard, a surge in anti-Asian hate, and most recently the fear brought on by intensified immigration enforcement during Operation Metro Surge. In moments like these, she says, speed becomes everything. Families affected by enforcement action could not wait for a grant cycle or a legislative session, so CAAL built its Solidarity Fund, in partnership with Linking Leaders, to move resources directly to community members without delay.
At the same time, Xiong found herself advocating for new programs inside a political climate openly hostile to that work, marked by the dismantling of diversity and equity programs across sectors and rhetoric she describes as demonizing the very communities CAAL serves. Holding both responsibilities at once, meeting urgent needs while fighting for structural change, is, in her words, one of the hardest parts of the job.
What that stretch of years taught her is that resilience is not something an individual musters alone. It is a collective practice.
“I could not have led through it alone, and I did not have to,” Xiong says. “Our network carried the response together.”
It also clarified what responsibility means to her: staying in the fight even when opposition is loud and progress arrives slowly.
“We keep up the fight,” she says simply, “because our communities are counting on us.”
Sustaining that fight over years requires deliberate grounding. Xiong finds hers in family and community, the same wellspring her purpose has always come from. Being surrounded by people who knew her long before any title keeps things in perspective. She also draws strength from Hmong storytelling traditions, a lineage that has carried history, humor, and hope through displacement and loss for generations, a reminder that her community has survived far harder chapters than this one.
In practice, Xiong treats rest and joy as part of the work rather than a break from it, since a movement that burns out its people cannot sustain the change it seeks. And there is a simpler fuel too: watching a new leader find their voice inside CAAL’s network never stops energizing her.
What She Tells the Next Generation
Xiong offers emerging leaders a clear, practical roadmap. Start where you are, she says, with what you already know, because lived experience is expertise in its own right, not something to overcome before earning permission to lead. Do not wait for a credential or a formal invitation, since the invitation rarely comes and the work cannot afford to wait.
Second, find your people. Meaningful change is never a solo undertaking, and the relationships built along the way carry leaders through setbacks that strategy alone cannot. Third, learn how systems actually function. Passion may open a door, but understanding budgets, processes, and power is what changes outcomes once you are inside. Finally, she urges leaders to stay rooted in the community even as their influence grows.
“The higher you go, the more intentional you must be about who you listen to,” she says. “If the people you serve can no longer reach you, you have traded impact for altitude.”
Looking ahead, Xiong hopes her legacy centers on something larger than herself: a generation of Asian American leaders across Minnesota who stepped fully into their power, and institutions that changed because those leaders were in the room. She hopes for communities that no longer have to fight for a seat at the table, because they built the table themselves.
“If CAAL’s network is stronger after me than it was with me, if resources and decision-making live closer to community than they did when I started, and if a young Hmong American girl in a small Wisconsin town grows up seeing people like her leading in public life, then the work will have done what it was meant to do,” Xiong says. “That is the only legacy that matters to me: that we made it easier for the people who come after us.”
It is a fitting close for someone whose life’s work began at a kitchen table, translating one language into another so her family could be understood. Decades later, ThaoMee Xiong has helped an entire network of leaders find their own voices, and in doing so, has begun to change what it means for Asian American communities in Minnesota to be seen.
